Payments made on behalf of BC residents who obtained services in Quebec, the U.S. and other countries are included. These payments appear in the MSP data because they have gone through the regular adjudication process. Please see the note under ‘exclusions' regarding services obtained in other provinces and territories in Canada.

Exclusion:

Data on abortion procedures, including those conducted in concert with other procedures, are only available by special request. Requests must demonstrate how Therapeutic Abortion (TA) data is required to fulfill the research objectives by providing a strong rationale. The Ministry of Health will review requests and make a decision on release according to existing policy on a case-by-case basis. This is in accordance with the BC Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act article 22.1.

Services provided through alternative payment plans, such as salaried, sessional, and service agreement contracts, etc. do not appear in the MSP payment files.

In April 2002, MSP stopped covering the majority of supplemental benefit services. These include: chiropractic, massage therapy, physical therapy, naturopathy, optometry, and podiatry services. These services are still provided in medically necessary cases for lower income individuals.

All provinces and territories (except Quebec) participate in ‘reciprocal billing agreements', where Canadians with coverage from other provinces or territories who receive services out-of-province are provided services without charge, and the providing province bills the services back to the home province. Records of these services are kept in a separate file (the "out of province services" file) and the amount of information collected is far less than what is included in the MSP Payment file. There are sometimes significant implications for understanding service use in areas bordering Alberta in particular, where it may make more sense for patients to receive care from a provider in Alberta rather than one in BC.

Population Data BC does not receive some payment adjustment fields in our data files. For most projects, this exclusion will have little meaningful impact.

All records that are associated with an ICBC or WorkSafeBC claim type are excluded from our standard MSP Collection (roughly 3.5 percent of MSP records; or 1.6 and 1.9 percent for WSBC and ICBC respectively). If the WorkSafeBC records in the MSP file are essential for your research, additional approval may be obtained from WorkSafeBC by selecting the option in the MSP data checklist when submitting the Data Access Request (DAR) to Population Data BC. Unfortunately, this option is not currently available for ICBC records.

Payments to physicians who perform WorkSafeBC expedited surgeries in public hospitals do not appear in the MSP Payment files. Expedited surgeries are paid at a different rate than what is specified in the MSP fee schedule and so are billed directly to WorkSafeBC.

Data is available from:

April 1, 1985

More Information (including references):

Information on data changes over time, quality/accuracy/field coding source and other additional information is available on PopData’s website: https://www.popdata.bc.ca/data/health/msp